The good folks over at Microsoft have released their Silverlight Toolkit today (or I guess yesterday, now). It's a good start to complement what you get in the core/box. I personally found the AutoCompleteBox probably the most interesting control, and the theming capabilities being introduced with the ImplicitStyleManager are promising, too. I also like the way the team is running the toolkit project on codeplex and all. Shawn Burke (of Ajax Control Toolkit fame) is a great guy to be leading that group of talented folks.

Of course, in my humble opinion ;-), no discussion of Silverlight controls would be complete without looking at the outstanding work that Infragistics is doing, particularly in the data visualization space. In our current CTP that you can download now, we have the xamWebChart, xamWebGauge, xamWebMap, xamWebTimeline, and xamWebZoombar.

If you go to http://infragistics.com/silverlight, you can read about all those controls, but I encourage everyone to just go play with them in our really awesome (if I do say so myself!) Silverlight controls samples browser. I mean, it is just plain fun tweaking around with it. I could sit and watch the datapoint transitions all day, and the chart zooming is freakin' cool. Needle dragging gauge, overview plus detail implementation for the map, timeline... Heck, who am I kidding? It's all sweet!

I'm not just saying that because I work there; I really was just having fun and am frankly impressed with the work our guys are doing. Kudos to our entire Silverlight team! Great job, guys! I'd name names, but I'm bound to forget someone. You know who you are!

And the fact that I'm playing with this in Safari on my Mac over my crappy hotel internet access just makes it that much cooler and fun. You gotta love Silverlight!

If you're interested more in Line of Business (e.g., Outlook bar, hierarchicial data grid, tree, etc.), check out our info on Silverlight LOB controls. According to our roadmap published there, you should see a CTP of our first release towards the end of this year. Silverlight rocks, and I'm looking forward to seeing it develop and being a part of making it even better.

You should stop by our booth at PDC, if you haven't already, and ask about all this. We're Booth #201 (about 3 down on the left from the middle entrance). There's still some time left, and you can pummel the guys and gals there with your questions. Of course, you can always just call, chat, or email someone as well (or use the contact link on this blog, and I'll put you in touch).

Also, feel free to stop me in the hall at PDC if you want. I won't bite. Everyone says I look like Kevin Smith (which is why I was Silent Bob at the Expo reception Monday), so you should be able to recognize me, even without the trenchcoat. :) Now I have to get to sleep so I can keep my promise and not be a zombie (and ergo not bite). G'night!

When talking about Silverlight development and Silverlight controls, you should not forget Visual WebGui which is an open source framework for developing data intensive web applications (Silverlight as well) based on its revolutionary 'empty client' platform.Visual WebGui http://www.visualwebgui.com/Silverlight Silverlight SDK includes a complete WinForms control toolkit which is implemented for Silverlight as well as a simplified Silverlight development experience and about to release a control wrapper tool which would wrap any ASP.NET component with VWG.